Seminar on "Culture and Economic Efficiency for Sustainable Development"

Economists are concerned about efficiency, but they usually take culture to be beyond their scope of study. If culture is studied, they tend to look at the economics of the creative arts. However, in this talk, I shall argue that culture has everything to do with economic efficiency, and what kind of culture we cultivate among ourselves and our future generations has a lot to do with our productive we are with our limited resources. Indeed, whether or not we can have "sustainable development" depends on how we produce and thus procure the "mental goods" that we all need in order to live a happy life.